A heated debate rages in America about what constitutes good parenting. Everyone who is a parent, or who has been parented, has experience and feels qualified to comment.

Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” touched off a firestorm of discussion and recriminations, while others emphasize the importance of nurturing a child’s self-esteem, of homeschooling, or of “free-range” parenting.

This month, however, the New Jersey Court of Appeals joined the fray with recriminations of its own; its decision has disturbing implications.

To a large degree, the parenting debate is healthy. It is natural and salutary that the marketplace of ideas sorts through competing visions for ideal child-rearing. The diversity of child-rearing practices reflects the richness of America’s cultural mix.

But in recent years, media-fed sensationalism has cultivated an obsession with child safety. We not only condemn others for their parenting, but call for formal legal intervention. Given the weak factual foundation for the fear-mongering, the courts have until now been slow to weigh in. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized the right to raise one’s child as one sees fit as a fundamental liberty interest, protected by the Constitution.

But those protections are fading as state institutions increasingly intervene, second-guessing parents and disrupting families, despite the fact that “neglect” is very much in the eye of the beholder.

The New Jersey case involves a woman who left her sleeping toddler in the car while she dashed into a store. The facts are far from troubling because the child was sleeping (not crying), in a locked car (rather than out in the open, but with the car’s climate control system on and the windows cracked), and left alone only five to 10 minutes (rather than over an hour). It is difficult to articulate any particular harm that could likely have come to the child. The risks of heat, cold, kidnapping or car theft all seem remote given the circumstances.

Alarmists will argue that “anything could happen,” and that’s true. But the child is arguably at greater risk of harm — by accident — walking through that parking lot, or riding in a shopping cart, than safely buckled in the car seat, asleep, for 10 minutes.

Child-safety orthodoxy ignores the fact that protecting your child from one risk almost always exposes him to another. Keeping children safely indoors promotes inactivity and obesity. Taking them with you to the store, instead of leaving them home alone, exposes them to accidents, the No. 1 cause of death of American children. “Free-range” parents argue that coddling and overprotecting children interferes with development and their ability to become responsible and self-sufficient.

Most disturbing about the New Jersey case, however, is that the court condemned the mother’s action without ever weighing the actual risk of genuine harm. The court ruled the mother wasn’t entitled to present evidence on either the likelihood or severity of harm to the child. The court said the imagined dangers spoke for themselves: “We need not describe at any length the parade of horribles that could have attended (this) neglect.”

Once legal authorities take sides in the parenting wars, the marketplace of ideas shuts down. Those who believe in teaching (and giving) children responsibility early in life know they must now conform to emerging overprotective norms, under penalty of law. Lost is not only the once-sacred right of parents to raise their children as they deem suitable and proper, but also the otherwise healthy debate over what constitutes good parenting.

A court of law should base decisions on facts, not media-hyped hysteria. This misstep by New Jersey’s court will stifle debate, as well as the diversity of parenting practices that were, until now, protected by law.

The merits of this mother’s actions would be good fodder for discussion, but when the court condemns her based on ill-informed, if popular, paranoia, the losers may be not only the parents in New Jersey, but the very children the court is trying to protect.

David Pimentel is director and visiting associate professor of law at Northern Ohio University’s Center for Democratic Governance and Rule of Law.